This year in our home, New Year’s meant cranking down the hard drive and heading out for coffee with pen & paper in hand and thoughts of friends & family in mind. Yes, we cranked down—but not before printing out spanking new address labels bearing these few, simple words: “Anti Facebook Greeting.”

In our home, we opted to ring the death knell on Facebook in favour of Canada Post. Our New Year’s resolve is to take a bundle of postcards out to our local café each Sunday and for an hour or so, while sipping fine Fair Trade brew, write to our friends in real live, real wet ink.

We’ll post our greetings and prove they’re worth the extra mile and the opportunity for tactile touch at the other end. Refrigerator doors will sparkle with our words and selected images—the gift of our Anti Facebook Greetings dropped through the mail slot.

In our dining room sits a raggedy old writing desk. It ain’t no antique (bought for $80 in 1982, so maybe it is?) but it’s the kind where the lid folds down to make a writing surface and where ladies of the last-to-last century retired, mid-morning, to catch up on correspondence a la George Eliot.

Or perhaps, more recently, members of the Bloomsbury group might have settled at a similar spot, nodding to the quaint customs of the Victorians.

Once we returned from the coffee bar, my partner Heather set about expunging all the junk that had previously bulged from this lovely desk—the kind of stuff that gets tossed in because we don’t know where else to put it—and replaced it with writing paper, postcards, and greeting cards. She sat the whole evening January 1st categorizing postcards and then dusted off greeting cards we had scattered around the house, things we’d once been charmed by, so purchased, but never quite got around to sending.

We have a pulp postcard book called “Hellcat Amazons”; Edward Gorey’s “The Letter Zoo Alphabet”; a great collection called “Lost Consonants” (‘her kids were driving her ‘round the bed’)—and the more staid and traditional Pre-Raphaelites and Van Gogh card collections. We now have postcards indexed into: cities/places; landscape; paintings; art objects; portraits; dolphins & whales (her fetish); and cartoons. On each paper we have stamped our AF Greeting. And snuggled in beside these mail-ables is a fat wad of spanking new postage stamps.

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About Nor

I'm a creative non-fiction writer, with a special interest in memoirs and obituaries--life stories, local histories with flesh & blood anecdotal details. I'm also beginning to create podcasts of people's stories and expanding their audiences. I'm a diarist, an editor, and a political activist. I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and spend days tapping keys or staining my fingers in ink.